Predictive Coding and Pitch Processing in the Auditory Cortex

• Published in: Journal of cognitive neuroscience Vol. 23; no. 10; pp. 3084 - 3094
• Main Authors: Kumar, Sukhbinder, Sedley, William, Nourski, Kirill V., Kawasaki, Hiroto, Oya, Hiroyuki, Patterson, Roy D., Howard, Matthew A., Friston, Karl J., Griffiths, Timothy D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209, USA MIT Press 01.10.2011; MIT Press Journals, The
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Auditory Cortex - blood supply; Auditory Cortex - physiology; Auditory Pathways - physiology; Brain; Brain Mapping; Causality; Electroencephalography - methods; Evoked Potentials, Auditory - physiology; Functional Laterality; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Magnetoencephalography; Models, Neurological; Neural Pathways - blood supply; Neural Pathways - physiology; Neurosciences; Oxygen - blood; Pitch Perception - physiology; Sensory perception
• ISSN: 0898-929X; 1530-8898; 1530-8898
• DOI: 10.1162/jocn_a_00021

In this work, we show that electrophysiological responses during pitch perception are best explained by distributed activity in a hierarchy of cortical sources and, crucially, that the effective connectivity between these sources is modulated with pitch strength. Local field potentials were recorded in two subjects from primary auditory cortex and adjacent auditory cortical areas along the axis of Heschl's gyrus (HG) while they listened to stimuli of varying pitch strength. Dynamic causal modeling was used to compare system architectures that might explain the recorded activity. The data show that representation of pitch requires an interaction between nonprimary and primary auditory cortex along HG that is consistent with the principle of predictive coding.